The fall of teachers unions

As the two big national teachers unions prepare for their conventions this summer, they are struggling to navigate one of the most tumultuous moments in their history.

Long among the most powerful forces in American politics, the unions are contending with falling revenue and declining membership, damaging court cases, the defection of once-loyal Democratic allies — and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign portraying them as greedy and selfish.

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They took a big hit Tuesday when a California judge struck down five laws they had championed to protect teachers’ jobs. The Supreme Court could deliver more bad news as early as next week, in a case that could knock a huge hole in union budgets. On top of all that, several well-funded advocacy groups out to curb union influence are launching new efforts to mobilize parents to the cause.

Responding to all these challenges has proved difficult, analysts say, because both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are divided internally. There’s a faction urging conciliation and compromise. Another faction pushes confrontation. There’s even a militant splinter group, the Badass Teachers Association.

Leaders of both the NEA and AFT have sought to rally the public to their side by talking up their vision for improving public education: More arts classes and fewer standardized tests, more equitable funding and fewer school closures. Those are popular stances. But union leaders can’t spend all their time promoting them: They must also represent their members. And that’s meant publicly defending laws that strike even many liberals as wrong-headed, such as requiring districts to lay off their most junior teachers first, regardless of how effective they are in the classroom.

The result: an unprecedented erosion of both political and public support for unions. And no clear path for labor leaders to win it back.

“People increasingly view teachers unions as a problem, or the problem,” David Menefee-Libey, a politics professor at Pomona College who studies education politics. That’s a striking shift, he said, because “for decades the unions were viewed as the most likely to contribute to the improvement of public education.”

Winter Hall, the mother of a 7-year-old in a Los Angeles public school, echoed that sentiment.

“Whenever there are teachers unions, it always comes off like the unions serve themselves — like it’s not about the education of the children,” she said.

Eager to push back, Hall helped organize a “parent union” at her daughter’s school, with help from the nonprofit Parent Revolution, which has received millions in funding from some of the nation’s richest philanthropies to organize moms and dads into a counterweight to teachers unions. She said it wasn’t a hard sell.

Teachers unions still have too much money and too many members to be counted out. Collectively, they represent 3.8 million workers and retirees. They bring in more than $2 billion a year.

Yet the share of Americans who see teachers unions as a negative influence on public schools shot up to 43 percent last year, up from 31 percent in 2009, according to national polling conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal Education Next. By contrast, 32 percent see unions as a positive force, up from 28 percent in 2009, the poll found.

Labor’s fading clout was evident earlier this month in the California primary, when unions representing teachers and other public sector workers spent nearly $5 million to boost state Superintendent Tom Torlakson to a second term — but failed to bring in enough votes for him to win outright.

Instead, Torlakson will have to fight for his seat in a runoff against a fellow Democrat, former charter school executive Marshall Tuck, who has bucked the teachers unions on many issues — and who has been endorsed by every major newspaper in California. In backing Tuck, most of the editorial boards specifically cited the urgent need to curb union influence.

Another sign of the shifting sands: the ruling this week in Vergara v. California striking down laws governing the hiring and firing of teachers. In a withering opinion, Judge Rolf M. Treu essentially blamed the unions for depriving minority children, in particular, of a quality education by shielding incompetent teachers from dismissal.

The unions argue that the laws in question simply guarantee teachers due process. They plan to appeal. But the judge’s rhetoric clearly hit a nerve. Education Secretary Arne Duncan hailed the ruling. So did Rep. George Miller, a leading Democratic voice on education policy in Congress. He called the union policies “indefensible.” A New York Times editorial went further, referring to the laws the unions had defended as “shameful,” “anachronistic” and straight-up “stupidity.”

Even Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), a veteran classroom teacher who strongly backs unions, said he was “open to reviewing and adjusting tenure laws,” though he called the ruling “disappointing.”

Ben Austin, a veteran Democratic operative who served in the Clinton White House, said the ruling was bound to make liberals uneasy about sticking by unions.

“It will be very difficult for Democrats to make the case that they are on the side of civil rights and social justice if they are defending unconstitutional laws that objectively harm poor kids and children of color,” said Austin, who serves on the board of Students Matter, the organization that brought the lawsuit.

Union leaders may be even more anxious about the upcoming Supreme Court case, Harris v. Quinn. Several of the conservative justices hinted during opening arguments that they might use the case to overturn a four-decades-old precedent that requires workers to pay dues if they benefit from a union’s collective bargaining work, even if they don’t officially join the union. That could slice away a big chunk of union revenue.

NEA President Dennis Van Roekel acknowledges that these are difficult times.

But he says he’s also confident that unions will not only survive, but thrive, because they give voice to teachers — and through teachers, to students.

Union foes, he said, “just want to silence that voice.”

Van Roekel posted a video response to this article on Friday afternoon. He told his members the union would keep fighting in the face of political attacks.

“It’s easy to get discouraged when the rhetoric of our opponents dominates the headlines and the airwaves,” he said in the video. “But I, like you, don’t look at the world through the pages of USA Today or the headlines in POLITICO.”

Van Roekel said he sees the world through the eyes of students and teachers, so instead of giving up, he gets angry.

“I have a message for those people who would seek to reduce children to a test score and teaching to a technological transaction. You are mistaken if you think we will see your attacks and get discouraged, that we will read the headlines and give up,” he said. “This association won’t give up until we have brought together everyone who believes in the promise of great public schools for all and we’ve declared victory for our kids.”

A HUNT FOR ALLIES

In many capital cities, the headquarters for the teachers union occupies prime real estate within a block or two of the statehouse.